


hue of beauty, glare of pain

by phantomreviewer



Series: Gorgon!Grantaire [3]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Angst, Canon Era, Canonical Character Death, Enjoltaire Week 2016, M/M, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Oreste à Jeun et Pylade Ivre | Orestes Fasting and Pylades Drunk, Period-Typical Sexism, exr week 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-09
Updated: 2016-06-09
Packaged: 2018-07-14 02:29:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7148987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phantomreviewer/pseuds/phantomreviewer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“You make not one, but three mistakes my friend. Firstly that I am joining you at your barricade of death, I much prefer my liquor. Secondly that I would be seen dead wearing such an unfashionable and uncouth piece of clothing – although, I must concede by my own logic that the only place wherein you could convince me to wear such a hat would be where my death was already accounted for, but finally, that you imagine that the beasts on my head would allow such a thing. Attempt to contain these serpents at your peril, but I fear I would look, to speak plainly, ridiculous. A writhing sea of snakes under cloth and a monster dressed as a man.” </i>
</p><p> </p><p>  <i>“No Grantaire,” Courfeyrac had said, unexpectedly serious at Grantaire’s self-directed jape, “We are fighting monsters.”</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	hue of beauty, glare of pain

**Author's Note:**

> Ever since 'Snakebite and Black' I've wanted to write a canon era gorgon!Grantaire fic. Enjoltaire Week & Barricade Day came around, so I thought, well, why ever not. If you squint this fic manages to fulfil the prompts of Days 1-5 in Enjoltaire Week (Embrace, Liberate, Greek Mythology, Divine & Alternate Setting). Edit: And retrospectively, Day 6 'Died Holding Hands' as well. You don't need to have read 'Snakebite and Black' for this to make sense, but in a way this is a canon!era AU of a modern!AU fic, so the character depictions and descriptions are intended to be the same. 
> 
> (Canon Grantaire, as much as I love him, is a bit of a misogynist, especially when faced with the feminised mythos surrounding the gorgon.)
> 
> Title from Percy Bysshe Shelley's _On The Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci_
> 
> The gorgon and Medusa has a fascinating history with regards to the French Revolution, so I hope to have put a little of that into this work. Enjoy.

Grantaire has known the revolutionary minded before. You could read their allegiance in their eyes. The good, those most likely to survive and thrive, and like to escape both the gaol cells and the watching eye of the state, had a determined icy gaze as though they could ascertain your politick through the windows of the soul. As though all of God’s creatures have souls. The bad, those like to die a martyrs death before the eve of battle, too rash, too brave, too young, their eyes burnt with fury feeling that it was their ordained task alone to rid the world of tyranny.

Every one of them lost. In the end.

But all of them: the good, the weak, the noble, the republican and royalists alike, oh their eyes caught on him.

He rarely looked back. At least, not with human eyes. A dozen snake eyes followed their every movement.

That he frequented drinking establishments where one particularly forceful and ill-fated gathering met to talk of the death of kings and the autonomy of the people, under a haze of wine and the hush of candle light was inconsequential. The wine was good and the brandy cheaper and their company, when they were not addled with thoughts of liberty was grand.

Until, of course, they started orating.

“A fortunate omen indeed that today we have in our midst-” “- A viper at the breast; Cleopatra’s asp itself held soft in a lover’s grip set to drip deadly poison and scorn through your very heart-”

The orator, Courfeyrac who was gesturing wildly between Grantaire’s scales and the small backroom, as though Grantaire had not interrupted.

“The face of the Jacobin: blood, death and rebirth of the insurrectionary tradition. Grantaire, I adore you.”

It was an extravagant, wine-addled means of publically announcing that Grantaire was less than he seemed and more than anyone ought be.

Gorgons were supposed political, their symbolism stolen from their race and imbued with politics and kings, with the struggle for something more than survival of the individual. Grantaire with yellow eyes, and his head of serpents focused all his energy on the preservation of the self. His soul had been lost, if those beyond humanity even had souls – the church was unclear on the topic, no religion could agree and regardless, Grantaire disagreed with them all on principle. To the devil with God, and to Hades the snakehaired go.

“Oh, bloody mother of a bloody country!” had been cried at him in 1830 through bloodied teeth and the dust haze of change. He had only sought to walk away to let what would happen exist. The world would exist should Grantaire hiss or curl or spit poison or drink. He was inconsequential to the turn of the earth, and inconsequential to Paris.

“I am no woman, sir,” he had retorted, deep in his cups and seeking if not peace, then silence. There would be no silence as cannon fire boomed. He thought that Paris would never be silent again. And he would not take responsibility, even in allegory, for the birth of the monstrosity.

“My scales do not denote my sex.”

And the revolutionary: no name, no face, no identity beyond the tricolour and the blood, had looked again.

Most gorgons were female, that, Grantaire could not deny. But while his race may belong to all who gazed upon him, and his humanity a matter of philosophical debate, his sex was his to assign and share at will.

“No,” the revolutionary had continued, shucking sweat from his forehead and eyes drifting away to follow the patterns of the snakes in the air, “but they mystify it. I see it now, now I look. You have come as Liberty and Revolution herself, except you cannot and will not possess her qualities. Others look upon you and see Medusa, Euryale, the Terror or the glory, but they don’t see a man.”

Grantaire’s patience had waned, there was a revolutionary speaking in poetry and metaphor dead on street corners across the city and this one burnt, as though the turning of Grantaire could turn the tide of Paris. He was not an omen of change. His scales were incidental to his politick. Revolution was not his game.

“Because, you see, a _man_ is not what I am.”

The other hadn’t startled away from his amber eyes, or the righteous fury of wrathful snakes, which Grantaire had grudging respected, but instead turned and sighed. As though questioning Grantaire’s sex and harassing innocent – Grantaire had never been innocent, he had been born cursed and hissing and had turned his nurse to stone – passers-by would make Paris any less corrupt.

“Farewell Monsieur Medusa.”

In the present, in the back room where Courfeyrac holds court, where Combeferre scribes and the chief surveys all with all the omnipotence that God himself does not turn towards his abandoned people, Paris is burning from the inside. A city of starving embers and deep wells of longing.

Grantaire is often cold. It is a symptom of his inhuman state and a consequence of living too far from the equator. There is a reason that the Greek history favours the gorgon. The climate agrees with them there. Paris has a chill in the winter months. But Grantaire has never directed himself towards comfort, when frivolity may be found.

Brandy is a warm enough embrace.

No one could hold it still. The tumultuous thunder rolling beneath Paris. The lot who Grantaire has fallen in with are pushing it ever further towards the brink. He can almost see the precipice that they are all balancing on - a narrow ledge, little room for others to join the fight without them all tumbling to the ground. Broken.

At least this group’s leader; Enjolras, quiet and proud and eyes like fire had looked him straight in the eye and named him gorgon. He left it to his lieutenants to expound upon his race’s supposed revolutionary fervour. He had judged Grantaire at face value, and found him lacking. Grantaire cared not about one single revolutionary mind amid dozens.

He lied.

He cared exceptionally; about one single, and one dozen.

He fell in with the revolutionaries. At first they wanted him for his symbolism, a gorgon in their midst would be worth a dozen human men for rallying faith, even if that gorgon was also Grantaire. A gorgon would hark back to a past age, to an age of revolution and bloodshed and the rising of the oppressed – Grantaire had never risen, other than to raise his head from whichever table he had passed out on, to hiss and to drink again – but then they wanted him for him. The person beyond the monster and behind the scales.

They never forgot, he never allowed them to forget what he was. Two-fold: gorgon and cynic, both.

“If the Republic be your mother, note that I say not my mother, for what republic could I spring from, fully formed as I am?” Grantaire had asked one evening, someone was speaking, but Grantaire was louder, and attention soon turned towards his voice. His voice almost human.

“But, where was I? If the Republic be mother, and Paris, dear _Patria_ as mistress, and Liberty herself all clad in skirts then how come no women stand before you. Let them too cast off their culottes – on the condition that we first provide them with adequate facilities for their sensibilities – and have them here, a blushing audience to stir their loins and their revolutionary spirits. Are they not one and the same?”

“Women are the ideal-” Combeferre had begun, and his rebuttal was interrupted by laughter; Joly and Bahorel leaning upon the other with mirth in their eyes.

“Ah, my friend. An opinion that we can share,” Grantaire had echoed his amused friends’ thoughts with his own words. But Combeferre would not be swayed. He was not a steadfast rock, he was a feather on the wind. He held his own against Grantaire’s ravings with a gentleness that did not belay his force, and he listened.

“Womanhood is our future Grantaire, my own mother is Paris just as Joly’s young mistress is Liberty. They hold our salvation in their hands, they must not hold our weapons too. We are shaped to be sacrificed to the greater, and what greater sacrifice is there than the ideal? Men are too entrenched in the world to be concepts, they must be action. It is for women to be ideals.”

“And what of me? If I am the scaled terror, what am I? As according to our dichotomy I can be neither man, for I am too irresponsible living in a world of wine fumes and libertines, or woman for my attributes are too masculine and my form too terrible. Am I to be soldier or iconography of your glorious world to come?”

“You, Grantaire,” Enjolras had said, descending from his throne of equality, highly strung with books and the broken bodies of the past, “shall be drunk.”

Grantaire had laughed. Enjolras had not.

They all seemed human. That was the most dazzling thing. Their abject humanity in the face of the world of men. Even Enjolras.

The quiet leader who glowed otherworldly in the candles – Grantaire dared not see him in sunlight, lest he be a figment of his own imagination.

He had not deigned to look on Grantaire again. But that one look had been enough. Dead in the eyes, as though he had no fear of the consequences. As though a gorgon was nothing more or less as another human beast. As though his ability to wrought death was the equal of any man, without serpent hair, spat poison and a stone stare.

Enjolras was beautiful as a woman and as brave as a lion. The snakes on Grantaire’s head writhed with an agonising pleasure when they tasted his presence in the air. He swore that he could taste Enjolras on his tongue as the man spoke. He did not need to be looked upon to feel Enjolras’ presence. He extended beyond himself, every word he spoke or plan he created hung in the air like a miasma. Enjolras was a pervading presence, and every inch of Grantaire could sense him – he was enveloped in that which he did not understand. For those scales fiends it was a stronger drug that Grantaire’s own frequented opium. To combine the two was a threat to his sanity, so he often partook.

Sometimes he dreamt that it was Enjolras who had snakes for hair and firecoals for eyes, and Grantaire would watch – clutched in the talons of Zeus and being torn away from his prize. His dreams were a haze of gods and men and monsters, and Enjolras. Always of Enjolras.

Enjolras who was born too soon and would die too early. They all would. They had the hearts of martyrs, the souls of poets and the bodies of soldiers. They ought to have stormed the Bastille.

“If only you would wear the bonnet rouge, what a stirring sight you would make on the barricade-” Jehan had remarked once gesturing to his snakes with an idle motion that Grantaire knew the snakes followed with their eyes, faces turning in unison towards Jehan’s fluttering hands.

Grantaire had warned him before, he was liable to bite. But the lion-hearted man had paid no mind and had the scarred fingertips to prove it.

He was not so used to lion hearted men, and now he found himself surrounded. Snakes and lions were unlikely bedfellows.

“You make not one, but three mistakes my friend. Firstly that I am joining you at your barricade of death, I much prefer my liquor. Secondly that I would be seen dead wearing such an unfashionable and uncouth piece of clothing – although, I must concede by my own logic that the only place wherein you could convince me to wear such a hat would be where my death was already accounted for, but finally, that you imagine that the beasts on my head would allow such a thing. Attempt to contain these serpents at your peril, but I fear I would look, to speak plainly, ridiculous. A writhing sea of snakes under cloth and a monster dressed as a man.”

“No Grantaire,” Courfeyrac had said, unexpectedly serious at Grantaire’s self-directed jape, “We are fighting monsters.”

There was no response. For they were fighting men, and worse, they were fighting ideas. Ideas as impenetrable as armour. And men were the worst monsters of all.

Enjolras touched his face. Once.

Later he was not convinced that he had not dreamt this too, but dreams took Grantaire to exotic places and gave him bright skin and human hair. The solid empty reality of the Café Musain proved otherwise. Except. Enjolras had touched him.

Enjolras had felt like stone, and he was so still that Grantaire feared – heart rabbit fast – that he had turned him. He had turned people before, and Enjolras would make a beautiful statue. But Enjolras had sighed, deep and disappointed. He lived. Grantaire had never lived before that moment.

They were alone and no words were spoken, and Grantaire’s finest imagining could not have created this series of events and so, logic denoted their reality. Just one marble cold finger had been pressed to almost-human skin, as though to find proof of the tangibility of a man such as Grantaire. And then that finger had brushed up his face to where his hairline should be and touched scale.

Such blistering heat.

The snakes could feel, a pale imitation of what Grantaire considered human sensation but never that raging fire.

Enjolras was burning from the inside out and he would scorch Grantaire until nothing but embers remained. He can’t remember if he gasped. But Enjolras pulled away, disappointed.

No words were spoken between them that day, not until the _Barriere du Maine_.

The gorgon is routinely assumed for revolutionary fervour that they do not process. The female gorgon, due to their sex are either revered or reviled, but oft spend less time entertaining public liberties. Who would marry a gorgon woman? And risk scaled children and an eternal hardness in the bedroom. And what woman, what brave woman would walk into room of men and tout for the revolution. Only a gorgoness would have the strength of body to reflect such a strength of mind.

Grantaire has no strength of mind but when his snakes are seen before his purse he is seen as the striking vision of revolutionary fervour that myth and history dictate. Grantaire is not so easily dictated. Oh, for being the iconoclasm of violence. And that assumption is tenfold when Grantaire, in his red waistcoat and associateship with the Apollo of the Rue de la Chanvrerie. Men would not discuss politick with a gorgon unless they either swore to or swore again the revolutionary life.

Many a man would play dominos however. Money is money regardless of what it has been won from.

Grantaire had disappointed his father, his mother and himself. It was no surprise that he should also disappoint Enjolras so thoroughly.

He slept, dreams of thunder and of shedding his skin and there being nothing but bone and acid beneath. Of watching Enjolras shed his skin too, shyly, intimately as though this were only the first step in the dance of the little death but instead of falling inwards, the skinless Enjolras blazed up a risen phoenix out of Grantaire’s ashes.

And still the thunder, and the hissing. Until, the peace.

The silence of the grave.

He spared himself a single glance at their entwined hands. They could be two human hands. Representative of an innocuous situation: of peace and love. And in a way they were, but more than that, they were peace and love, and death.

Enjolras looked him in the eye and smiled. The only sound was the hissing of his snakes, the laboured breathing of the guards and the pounding drum of Grantaire’s heart.

He did not know how he must have looked to the National Guard. The symbol of revolution, laid dead drunk while beautiful liberty stood alone, only to rise, to stand and fall again.

Snakes flailing, hissing and spitting poison. The wood around them shall be stained white and red. Poison and blood. A fitting end.

The frothing snakes sullied Enjolras’ beauty, impacting on his dramatic display and paling his coat but under the circumstance he thought that the man would not mind. His hand tightened in Grantaire’s grip, and Grantaire had no means of interpreting what that gesture could mean. No matter, soon it would not matter at all.

A gorgon, hand in hand with a revolutionary and staring down the barrel of a gun. French Liberty and Freedom. Man and Monster. Together. That was an image for the ages, the stirring of more than a bloody rebellion, but the tableau of an idea. A concept. In that moment they were more than humanity.

The dry warmth of the dawn at his back, and the damp spreading coldness of death in front.

Enjolras’ hand in his.

**Author's Note:**

>  _“The result is [... an emblem of the political and sexual specularity ...] the interchangeability of the Phrygian cap and the head of Medusa.”_ (The Medusa Reader, ‘Medusa In The French Revolution’ – Neil Hertz, 191.)


End file.
